


Sick as a Rat

by Chordae



Series: Din Djarin’s Guide To Fatherhood and All the Existential Crises Inbetween [8]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: ManDadlorian, Obligatory Sickfic!, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:55:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22096747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chordae/pseuds/Chordae
Summary: His kid sneezes and nothing that cute and pitchy should be able to make Din feel as if the world is collapsing around him.
Series: Din Djarin’s Guide To Fatherhood and All the Existential Crises Inbetween [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1586989
Comments: 8
Kudos: 302





	Sick as a Rat

**Author's Note:**

> Whoops was going to post something else but now y’all’re stuck with a sickfic.  
> jkjk what I was initially going to post is proving longer than I thought it’d be so Yahtzee.  
> woah shit whoops this has a minor reference to ‘Parental Bounty Hunters Anonymous’ but you don’t have to had read it in order to understand.

It starts with uncharacteristic silence from the kid.

He’d been quiet since he’d woken up (which had been a standard hour ago or so), and Din, well used to his kid’s schedule, is acutely aware of the fact that this is around the time that the kid starts causing trouble- getting into the food stores, gnawing on toys, shrieking and pointing at every possible planet that they pass- but so far there’s been nothing more than the rare warble of a not-word.

Din steers them along, blurred pinpricks of light and streaky planets fading in their peripheral. His kid sits in his booster seat on the co-pilot’s side and stares out the window, more listless than his usual innocent wondering.

Din glances over a few too many times, the kid’s silence unlike himself to the point of being concerning. 

Suddenly, his out-of-character silence is broken, a small sniffle resounding throughout the cockpit.

Din thinks nothing of it and is simply glad for the break of stifling silence.

Then the kid  _ sneezes _ , and it’s as if Din can feel the world collapsing around him because  _ his kid is  _ **_sick_ ** _. _

_ - _ But, no. He can’t be  _ sick.  _ It must be a fluke of some sort, some stray dust-

The kid hacks out a painful sounding cough, then the wettest sneeze physically possible, and Din’s already slamming on autopilot and scrambling out of his seat to his kid.

Din’s about to do- well, he’s about to do  _ something, _ but he’s currently not quite sure  _ what _ , his hands hovering uncertainly over the kid’s slight form.

Even from that distance, between a layer of a thick pair of  _ gloves _ , Din can feel the feverish heat emanating off the kid. 

His kid looks up at him and ( _ that’s a lighter shade of green is he paler than usual? _ ) Din immediately peels off the glove of one of his hands, pressing the back of it to the scrunched, green forehead.

He lightly curses beneath his breath because the kid doesn’t  _ usually  _ run this hot, does he? No, no, Din’s pretty sure the kid doesn’t usually run this hot, and now he’s panicking.

_ He could’ve caught some deadly disease on the last planet,  _ Din thinks, hysterical,  _ What am I supposed to do if he **caught** **some** **deadly** **disease** **on** **the** **last** **planet**?  _

Then he doubles over on his thoughts and reaffirms himself that it’s highly unlikely that he caught a deadly disease,  _ but what if he  _ **_did_ ** _? kids have shit immune systems that’s a known fact, right? _

The kid lets out a gurgled cry, his voice raspy and his eyes watering. The feverish flush shows clearly on his sickly pallor, and he’s letting out piercing cries and making grabby-hands at Din.

Din snatches the kid out of his booster seat, settling him on his waist as he scrabbles to find the first aid kit. He’s disappointed but not surprised when he opens it to find a sad barely-a-roll of bandages, for some reason stained with blood, and not even the slightest sign of something that vaguely resembles medicine. The multiple painkiller bottles are empty, but even then he’s not quite sure the kid could have them, right? He does, thankfully, spot a familiar card, his sloppy scrawl that barely passes as handwriting displaying an address to a child physician- or, well, a physician of some sorts, but there can’t really be  _ that _ much of difference between an adult and a kid, anatomically, right? Besides, like, the aforementioned shit immune system and their tiny bodies.

With slightly trembling hands and a crying kid plastered to his side, he hurries to their food stores, blatantly recalling an edible (at least, he’s  _ pretty sure _ it’s edible) poultice that he’d bought as some mock-jelly for the kid. The shopkeep had advertised it as also being a throat-soothing elixir of sorts.

Din gently hushes his kid and tenderly offers him a small glass of the poultice. 

The kid stares at it a moment, crying momentarily abated, and wraps his hands around the glass. He slurps it and makes a face, as if revolted by the substance. Then, as expected, he schools his expression and greedily drinks the rest of it in a few seconds flat. The kid hands the glass off to him, nearly dropping it onto the ground, then tiredly blinks. Just like that, the kid nods off, head tilted forward and resting on Din’s chest.

Din sighs, exasperated, and hurries back to the cockpit, sure not to jostle the resting kid along the way. He punches in the coordinates for the planet that the physician is on, then twitchily takes a seat, arms full of a whimpering, too-warm child.

(He  _ might’ve  _ entered hyper drive, but that’s besides the point.)

* * *

Din paces the room, stopping every now and then to stare at his kid who sits atop the counter, still a bit green(er?) around the edges but happily swinging his stubby legs back and forth with a previously lost fervor. 

“Is he going to be alright?” Din asks, a bit ashamed by how desperate he sounds. What he really meant to say was, ‘Is he going to live?’, but he didn’t want to ask that  _ in front of the kid. _

The physician looks up from her clipboard and at his kid, then back at Din, somehow sending him a fond variation of a ‘really?’ glare.

“It’s a common cold.” She deadpans, expression stoic for a moment before it breaks into a kind grin. “I understand, though.” She sympathizes, surprisingly sincere. “I get a lot of new parents bustling their kids in here if their temperature is even a tenth of a degree over the usual.”

Din  _ doesn’t _ meekly duck his head.  _ He  _ **_doesn’t_ ** .

(She laughs at him anyways.)

Din retrieves his excited,  _ sick _ , kid from the countertop, mentally justifying that he’d been away from him for a bit too long (even if ‘away’ counts as being standing a meter away from him).

“He’s got a bit of a fever, he’ll have a bad cough for awhile, and his throat seems a bit stuffy.” She easily explains, handing a small bottle over to Din. “Other than that, he’ll be better in no time-  _ especially  _ if he takes that.” She finishes, giving a firm look at the bottle that was now in his clutches.

Din eyes the bottle warily, shakes it a bit, the weird substance sloshing around inside, then looks between it and his kid.  _ All  _ of it? That seemed like a bit much, even if-

“It’s some child antibiotics. He’ll be  _ fine _ . Just have him take the enclosed measurements every standard twenty-four hours for the next week and he’ll be  _ fine _ .” She stresses, carefully enunciating ‘fine’ as if Din was hard of hearing.

(At this point, she assumes he  _ is _ , for she’s quite sure she’s explicitly stated _multiple times_ that the kid is okay, but the Mandalorian still sulks about as if the kid’s on his  _ deathbed _ .)

Din stares at it a moment longer, then nods. He digs out a sizeable amount of credits, and forks them over to her.

“What-” She splutters, incredulous, her eyes going wide at the amount of credits practically being thrown at her. “Sir, this is a  _ free clinic. _ ” She pushes his cash back at him, in which he gingerly pockets.

“...So I don’t pay you?” He ventures, and receives a firm nod.

“Just make sure he gets better.” She nods at the kid. “Wouldn’t want to see a kid as cute as him  _ die _ .” She snickers.

He knows she’s joking, but he can still feel a brief spike of panic and himself tensing up, his hold on his kid tightening ever-so-slightly.

As if she can tell, the physician laughs at him then shoos the father and son duo out of her office.

(Din manages to slip a few credits on her desk as he brushes by, then quickly removes the additional, slobbery credit out of his kid’s mouth, hesitantly pocketing it.)

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I got your hit now, sucker 🔫>:-)  
> (-But seriously, thanks for reading. I really do appreciate it. I’m just maybe running on 13+ hours of sleep and may not be able to demonstrate my gratitude correctly, but thank you if you’ve somehow managed to stick around this long. Kudos to you, honestly. I read all the comments and I’m truly thankful for all you awesome people- I’m just kind of really socially inept and cannot write a reply worth a shit.)


End file.
